


born of the devil himself

by hilarions



Category: D.Gray-man
Genre: M/M, preschool teacher link, single parent tyki
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-24
Updated: 2018-05-24
Packaged: 2019-05-13 07:34:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14744613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hilarions/pseuds/hilarions
Summary: “I have a couple of students missing,” he corrected, and lifted his roll to read, “Mana and Neah Campbell?”“Missingmissing, or they didn’t turn up?” Emilia asked amidst the sound of her typing quickly, likely bringing up the kids’ files.“They didn’t turn up,” Link said, briefly checking his watch. Half past nine. Surely there was a good excuse.





	born of the devil himself

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hurryup](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hurryup/gifts).



> the best thing about this whole fic is that link gets to say the word poop

The new year, as a preschool teacher, was always something of a lucky dip. There was no one to say what the students would be like, who were the troublemakers, who would need more attentive help. If he was to be honest, though, Howard Link had a concerningly _good_ feeling about his class.

On the whole they were at once meek and excited and respectful and rambunctious, but not one of them was so distraught with being at school for the first time that a crying fit was had for more than, say, ten minutes, and none of them seemed so thrilled with being out of their parents’ supervision that they felt the need to fulfill a burning desire of wanton destruction. It was nice. A lovely bell curve of students; no frustrating outliers.

Except, perhaps, the two who simply hadn’t turned up to their first day. Lord knows what happened there.

It was after calling the roll and having each of the ten - rather, _eight -_ students introduce themselves that Link sent them off to familiarise themselves with the tables stocked with coloured pencils and print-out drawings. It was while they were busying themselves in a loud bundle of excited chatter that Link picked up the phone from the hook by the door and dialed the office.

“This better not be what I think it is,” Emilia warned from the other end before he could get so much as a word in. “I’ve already had one of Tewaku’s grade ones pee themselves.”

“No,” Link confirmed, and cast a short glance out across the classroom just to make sure that would remain true for the next few minutes at least. “I have a couple of students missing,” he corrected, and lifted his roll to read, “Mana and Neah Campbell?”

 _“Missing_ missing, or they didn’t turn up?” Emilia asked amidst the sound of her typing quickly, likely bringing up the kids’ files.

“They didn’t turn up,” Link said, briefly checking his watch. Half past nine. “Did their parents call ahead this morning?”

“No calls,” Emilia hummed, considering. “I’ll ring up, see what’s happening.”

“Thank you,” Link sighed, crisp with relief.

“No poops?” she assured.

“No poops,” Link confirmed and placed the phone back on the hook. With a sigh and a shake of his head Link went to crouch by one of the low tables, intent on familiarising himself with his new students while Emilia sorted it out.

It was ten minutes later, midway through helping Lenalee colour a rainbow and side-eyeing the size of the teeth on Timothy’s twenty-legged ‘dog’, that the phone rang on the wall. Link handed Lenalee the blue pencil he’d been using with a gentle, encouraging smile, pushed himself to stand and answered with a prompt, “Hello?”

“Apparently they’re _late,”_ Emilia reported, and sounded more than somewhat doubtful.

“What do you mean, _late?”_ Link asked, repeating the suspicious tone she’d lent the word.

“I mean,” she huffed, “this Tyki - their dad, right? - is a terrible liar, and when he said ‘we’re running late’ it sounded like ‘I forgot school started today and I’m already at work’.”

Link’s eyes fell closed and he pulled in a quiet, careful breath. Passing over any and all _opinions_ that gave him, Link ensured, “They are coming, though?”

“In a half hour,” Emilia confirmed, and Link steeled himself for it with a quiet, frustrated sigh. “What?” she demanded with what sounded like a roll of her eyes. “At least they’re coming, right?”

“It’s not that,” Link countered and looked out across his bubbly class of earnestly working students. “Do you know how impossible five-year-olds get if they’re given macaroni art without being eased into it with coloured pencils?”

“I ran a kindergarten for five years,” Emilia reminded, dry and just as dreadful as Link felt in the pit of his stomach. “Have you ever injected a five-year-old with an adult’s dose of adrenaline? No. Why would you even _try?_ Just skip macaroni art. It’ll be fine.”

Defeated, Link dropped his head and muttered, “I already told them we’d be doing macaroni art.”

Emilia was silent for a long beat. “Just,” she hazarded doubtfully, “skip… macaroni art? Maybe they won’t notice.”

Lips twisting skeptically, Link stated, “You’re basing the success of that off the possibility that a group of five year old children will forget the promise of _macaroni art.”_

Voice filled with forced hope, Emilia challenged, “What’s the worst that could happen? Tears?”

“First day of preschool,” Link sighed, bitterly defeated, “and the only thing they’re going to learn is that life isn’t fair.”

“Life _isn’t_ fair,” Emilia agreed, and morosely added, “and now I have to arrange someone to pick up the student who just vomited a whole bag of gummy worms all over their desk.”

“Welcome to the new year,” Link offered doubtfully and placed the phone back on the cradle. Briefly he looked out over his lovely, wonderful, perfectly ideal class and forced those doubts out of mind. There was no possible way two individuals could ever be awful enough to outweigh the good in the group unless, somehow, they were born of the Devil himself. And the chances of them being even a _little_ bit bad?

Slim.

* * *

That was how Howard Link had felt twenty minutes ago, when he’d been bending down to gently extricate a ball of paper from Lavi’s fist and the chunk he’d bitten out of it from his mouth.

Currently though, faced with one child trying valiantly to choke the life from his father with how tightly he was clinging around his neck and the other only held back from charging through the desks with a fearsome war cry by the fact his legs simply couldn't reach the floor from where he was dangling from that same father’s helpfully raised arm, things were not looking so bright.

 _“I don’t wanna go-o-oooo,”_ Mana was sobbing in the hoarse, broken, unbearably unhelpably unbelievably distressed voice of a child who knew exactly how to sound brutally, heartbreakingly upset.

In tandem with Mana’s screams, Neah’s legs were kicking wildly in the air and he was screaming, _“Let me go-o-oooo!”_ in a brutish demand for freedom.

Mister Campbell did not look the least bit overwhelmed. Simply put, he looked apologetic.

“You must be Howard,” he said with a roguishly sheepish sort of smile.

“Link,” he corrected, somewhat crisp, but Campbell only nodded as though they were agreeing and not as though Link was of the opinion that bringing his screaming children into school an hour after their first day had started was not grounds for a first name basis. Prim, he asked, “Mister Campbell, could you please tell me why you’re arriving an hour late?”

Campbell, if possible, looked somehow _more_ roguishly sheepish, and glanced down to carefully lower Neah to the floor - sure to keep a stern hand holding his son’s wrist in some effort to stop him from tearing the place apart in an instant. “I’d love to lie, because then I’d just look like a liar and not a neglectful parent,” he admitted, heedless of Neah swinging off his arm and pushing furious frustration at his hand, “but right now,” he amended, pinning Neah with a reprimanding look, “we are teaching this young man what we do with liars. Neah?” he prompted expectantly.

Neah stopped groaning abhorrent frustration for a moment and blinked up at his father before turning to face Link with a truly chilling smile. “We eat them,” he said.

“We don't,” Campbell sighed, and Neah took back to swinging off his arm, stomping his feet and cheering.

“We do!” he announced excitedly. “We do, we boil them up and eat them!”

“We put them in Time Out,” Campbell corrected sternly, and let go of Neah’s hand to point out the blocked-off warning-signed Quiet Corner.

Neah looked from the corner back to Tyki, and his horrifically jubilant face crumpled into outraged helplessness. “But I didn't _lie!”_ he cried, shrill with offence.

Unaffected, Campbell reminded, “You just told Mister Link we cannibalise people. Be lucky I'm not cooking you up.”

 _“No!”_ he screeched, soft fists clenched at his sides.

 _“Yes,”_ Campbell countered emphatically, inarguably authoritative, and Neah found himself with no choice but to helplessly stomp off to Time Out, groaning furiously all the while. “He’s not bad,” Campbell rationalised for Link with the same stiff smile of a parent who knew their child wasn’t particularly _likable_ to others, “he’s just a bit overexcited. And this guy,” he added, lifting Mana higher on his hip - Mana, who, with all the distraction Neah had caused, seemed to be taking any chances he could get with turning completely silent and hoping his father would forget to set him down before leaving, “is an angel. When he wants to be,” he added, and pulled back a touch to look down at Mana’s face.

Mana gave a long, quiet whine and buried his face back against Campbell’s neck.

He looked back up at Link with a face like a sigh and explained, “Honestly, it’s gotta be like a bandaid. But you’ll have to keep him close until he decides to stop crying or he _will_ run off and try follow me to work. And I know how that _sounds,”_ he amended quickly, “but. What kind of stupidly overprotective parent forgets what week their kids’ first school year starts and leaves for work without a second thought.”

“How,” Link tried, and shook his head in honest amazement. “How could you forget what _week_ they start?”

Campbell opened his mouth with an excuse sitting on the tip of his tongue before, after a moment’s hesitation, he bit it back and allowed, “I accept full responsibility.”

“Of your five-year-old children?” Link prompted, scathing. “I should think so.”

“Although,” he amended quickly, “I’m quite certain the kid who looks after them over the summer holidays just wanted to be paid for taking the first week off school.”

Link blinked at him, heavily pointed.

“But,” he amended secondly, “yes, my fault, completely. Tyki, by the way,” he added, shuffling Mana to his other hip so he could offer his hand out to Link with that same roguishly sheepish smile as he’d first worn. “I promise,” he said, voice catching on a laugh when Link let his hand be caught in his firm, warm grip, “it won’t happen again.”

Forcibly stern, Link assured, “Be sure that it doesn’t,” and didn’t dare let himself sigh when Tyki dropped his hand.

“Now, you,” he announced, lifting Mana up under the arms and lowering him carefully to the floor amidst cautionary whines of growing distress, “are gonna be good for Mister Link. Right?” he prompted, crouching down to look Mana in the eye.

Mana shook his head fervently and tried to wind his arms around Tyki’s neck all over again.

“You like when Allen looks after you?” Tyki prompted, and Mana reluctantly nodded, lips pushing into a heart-wrenching pout. “Then you like Mister Link,” Tyki reasoned simply. “He’ll look after you now too, okay?”

Mana shook his head again, and threw himself against Tyki’s chest in a clinging, desperate hug.

Tyki smiled a quick apology up at Link and ducked his head to murmur against Mana’s cheek, “Hey, remember what I told you? I’ll be back at three o’clock,” he reminded, and lifted one of Mana’s pudgy little arms so they could both see the watch he wore on his wrist. “See?” Tyki prompted. “When the little hand gets to the three, and the big hand is at the twelve. Okay?”

Mana nodded sullenly beneath his chin.

“Will you let Mister Link look after you until then?” he asked again, low voice quiet and untouchably gentle.

Mana nodded once more and extricated himself from his father to turn to Link. Link reached out a hand for him to take, but Mana chose rather to throw himself against Link’s side and curl his arms stubbornly around his leg.

“It’s okay,” Link murmured to the big fat tears that were bubbling up in Mana’s eyes once more, and rested a hand atop his head to ruffle his long black hair, tied back neat at the nape of his neck with an elastic band. He reserved a skeptical look for Mana’s father. “Sure you won’t be late?” he asked, voice laced with a kind of snark.

Tyki’s face broke into a warm, laughing smile and he pushed himself to his feet. “If anything, I’ll be early,” he said and pressed a kiss to his fingers which he patted against Mana’s red-stained cheek. “Tell your brother when I’ll be back, okay?” he said, and started making for the door.

Mana lurched after him with a sharp, desperate cry, one arm stretched out for his dad and the other still curled tightly around Link’s leg, but Tyki only paused to wave goodbye with a smile made bigger just for Mana before slipping out the door. Mana pressed his face against the side of Link’s thigh and started to bawl, and when Link looked back at the class with a weary sigh caught in his throat he discovered Neah had let himself free from Time Out and was entertaining Timothy by scribbling on his face with one of the markers from the whiteboard, and Howard Link decided that as slight as the chances might be, they truly had come to light.

Two children born of the Devil himself.


End file.
